No, I was never Chief Altar Boy. I am too humble to attain to such a glorious rank.

As for stamping things on atoms, wouldn't that just cause more bickering? "That's MY atom! See, it's got my name on it!" Of course, it would make it easier to have a "Return to Sender" tag for Gluon....

The quivering sanctimony ! The smug superiority!! The mind-boggling mythological pretensions!! The mind quivers with incipient nausea at the very thought!!

Think I don't know what I'm talking about? Chief Altar Boy, Saint Matthew's Episcopal Choice, right up to the time I realized...well, never mind what I realized. But it was pre-budding-bosom time, if ya take my meaning.

In other, much more important news, light is become muych more cooperative thanks to the lion-tamers over at Hahvahd Physics:

In 1999, Hau headed a team of scientists that slowed light, which travels a brisk 186,282 miles a second when unimpeded, to a leisurely 38 miles an hour by shining it into an exotic, ultracooled cloud of sodium atoms. At temperatures a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the atoms coalesce into a single quantum mechanical entity known as a Bose- Einstein condensate. Shining a laser on the cloud tunes its optical properties so that it becomes molasses when a second light pulse enters it.

Then, in 2001, Hau and a second team of physicists, this one from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, brought light to a complete halt by slowly turning off the laser. The Bose-Einstein cloud turned opaque, trapping the light pulse inside. When the laser was turned back on, the trapped light pulse flew out.

The latest results add an additional twist: transporting the pulse to a second Bose-Einstein cloud and regenerating the light there.

"That's the sort of stuff we find really sexy in this business," said Eric A. Cornell, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In the new Harvard experiment, when the initial pulse slammed into the first Bose-Einstein cloud, the collision caused 50,000 to 100,000 of the sodium atoms to start spinning, almost like small tops, and pushed this small clump forward at less than a mile an hour.

Hau described the clump of atoms as a "metacopy" of the light pulse. Although it consisted of sodium atoms instead of particles of light, it exactly captured the characteristics of the light pulse.

The clump floated out from the rest of the cloud, traveled about two-tenths of a millimeter and burrowed into a second Bose-Einstein cloud. When a laser was shined on the second cloud, the atom clump transformed into a new pulse of light identical to the original pulse.

It was refinements to the 2001 experimental technique that extended the time the particles maintain quantum collective behavior. This allowed the clump to reach the second cloud.

Pondering the applications Transforming a light signal into a clump of atoms could be a way of storing information. ("You could put it on the shelf for a while," Hau said.) It could also enable a way of performing calculations in future optical computers that employ quantum algorithms to speed through certain types of calculations.

But one hurdle to building a computer that calculates with light is that it is difficult to grab onto and manipulate a quick-moving light pulse. Performing calculations with atomic clumps would be much easier with the result changed back into light and then sped to the next step.

"That has been a missing link," Hau said.

The advance could also find applications in quantum cryptography, which can hide messages in codes that cannot be broken.

This idea of stamping atoms with the pattern of light, transporting them elsewhere and having the light pop out again is an interesting one. It could lead, sooner or later, to a genuine Cloak of Invisibility!! Wahey!!

I, of course, was not among those who might gladly sin, even just a little. My time in school, from elementary through graduate, was spent on my knees, praying. I reveled in being an altar boy and thought the song "Little Altar Boy" was about me (which in fact it was). I include it here as I am sure that it will bring Amos and some other sinners to repentance, perhaps even force them into a monastery or convent (monastery for the males, convent for the females):

Little Altar Boy

Little altar boy, I wonder could you pray for me? Little altar boy, for I have gone astray What must I do to be holy like you? Little altar boy, oh, let me hear you pray

Little altar boy, I wonder could you ask our Lord Ask him, altar boy, to take my sins away What must I do to be holy like you? Little altar boy, please, let me hear you pray

Lift up your voice and say a prayer above Help me rejoice and fill that prayer with love Now I know my life has been all wrong Lift up your voice and help a sinner be strong

Little altar boy, I wonder could you pray for me? Could you tell our Lord I'm gonna change my way today? What must I do to be holy like you? Little altar boy, oh, let me hear you pray Little altar boy please let me hear you pray!

Scientists are extremely concerned about the effects global warming will have upon polar snakes.

Polar snakes are an extremely important species because in following their annual migratory paths from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again, polar snakes leave subtle yet distinct trails which define the earth's longitudinal lines. If the polar snake were to become extinct, the logitudinal lines would dissapear. And since the force exerted by longitudinal lines is what holds the earth in its current spherical shape, their loss would result in the earth instantaneously springing into the shape of a cylinder instead of a sphere. Imagine a globe suddenly transformed into a Mercator projection. Greenland would suddenly swell to a size roughly equal to Africa. Greenlanders who live next-door to one another would awaken to find their houses separated by hundreds of meters. Antarctica would become a giant atoll surrounding a lagoon of empty space where the South Pole used to be.

Noted Japanese researcher Fitsuko Mibuyashi summed up the importance of preserving the polar snake population very succinctly:

"No porar snake, no rines of rongitude. No rines of rongitude, sairors get rost and not get to port. No sairors in port, bimbos and froozies not make money and overroad werfare system. Keep froozies emproyed, save porar snake."

When I was just a tad of a lad, many years ago, I would daily skip light-heartedly to a Catholic elementary school. There the good nuns would guide us, educate us, and gently admonish us when we would stray, child-like, from the straight and narrow path.

After eight years I graduated and went on to learn at a high school taught by the Fratres Scholarum Christianiorum -- the Christian Brothers. By then many of us had noticed Certain Bodily Changes and that the young ladies of our sister institution were also experiencing Certain Bodily Changes. These Changes made them objects of greater interest than people whose pigtails we might dip in the inkwell on our desk and indeed many of us would have willingly done more than chastely carry their books home from school while discussing the upcoming sock hop or.

The good Brothers, in their wisdom, brought to our attention a Church-founded, Church-sponsored, and Church-approved organization called "Club 69." The members of this organization made a vow to never, ever, violate the Sixth and Ninth Commandments: the injunctions against adultery and coveting your neighbor's wife. Needless to say, "Club 69" membership cards, tee shirts, and other things became very popular among my classmates until, for some unexplained reason, the Brothers closed down the club.

We were not, I must admit, interested in adultery and coveting another's wife. We were much more interested in some friendly fornication and avoiding wives, especially one of our own.

And contrary to what I said earlier, upside down it's 19091. That just proves what I said about upside down numbers.

I intend to use these findings as the study that gets me the Nobel Prize In Counting Things. You should know that if you steal my idea and get the Nobel Prize In Counting Things before I do I will be most displeased and unhappy, mostly because of the money.

Well, it wouldn't work with me! MY medial frontal lobes, along with the rest of my frontal lobes, were removed back in 1965 by an irate young woman I was dating at the time. Something about me only thinking about one thing all the time or something.

Brain scans that can read a person's secret intentions even before they act have been demonstrated by researchers.

In a recent study, the technology was 70% accurate at predicting whether participants planned to add or subtract a pair of numbers. Paralysed people may one day be able to use devices based on the technique to carry out complex actions, the researchers say. However, ethical concerns have been raised about its possible use in interrogation.

John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues recruited eight people for their trial and placed each of them in a brain scanning machine that produced computed tomography (CT) images.

While participants had their brains scanned, they were asked to secretly decide whether they would add or subtract two numbers due to appear on a screen in front of them. After a pause of a few seconds, they then viewed the two numbers and gave their answer.

Train times Once the computer program designed to interpret the brain scans had been "trained" on 40-minutes-worth of calculations by a participant, it could predict their calculating intention with 70% accuracy. Haynes explains that the computer program could do this by focusing on the pattern of activity in a brain region known as the medial prefrontal cortex.

From this day to the ending of the world, But we in MOAB shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of siblings; For s/he to-day that share this wine with me Shall be my sibling; be s/he ne'er so vile This day shall gentle his or her condition: And gentlefolk in Mudcat, now a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their (wo)manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That drank with us upon Mom's Sixteen Thousandth day.

I can but say what I have said afore: O! do not wish one more: Rather proclaim it, Amos, through my host, That he which hath no stomach to this celebration, Let him depart; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse: We would not drink in that man's company That fears his fellowship to drink with us. This day is call'd the feast of Crispian: And Mom hath had her sixteen thousandth post, And we will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, And rouse the barkeep at the name of MOAB. He that shall survive this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say, 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:' Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day Celebrating Mom's sixteen thousandth post When bottles emptied as if by magical means And songs from a thousand throats were sung And tho' this was long, long ago, I am hung over yet.'

That's grand -- if you can use a Mudcat connection to bring about a library fundraising, or even just library PR, you can all at one swoop release ALL the angst you have built up about cruising the Cat on library time!! It all sublimates into R&D for the good of the library!! How cool is that?!!

The Portneuf Brewing Company will, if I give them enough lead time, brew up a special amber (or other) beer for my Library's centennial celebration. The seismic activity you would detect would be Minnie Howard, a life-long member of the WTCU, spinning in her grave.